Grand Tichu, bronze animals and a whole lotta fast food

 Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, all you peeps!

Here's some pictures and some words about ours. 

Christmas! We both stayed up/pretended to sleep all night while we shniked each other with extra candy all over the living room and just ended up talking in bed at 4 in the morning before we actually got up at 7 haha. 

Then we took a last minute trip to Texas to see the Willises with intentions to see Carlsbad Caverns and some other stuff on the way home. 

It was such a fun trip even though it generally went way different than we planned. Which, we didn't really plan it, so I guess that added to its greatness!

The drive to Texas was nothing like you can imagine unless you are very good at imagining hours and hours of the exact same foggy, dead, dreary, dry landscape for hours on end.

But we still had fun all those hours!

It was SO FUN to see the Willises in their natural habitat, especially since Tyler is a different boy there than he is at the Roy Family Reunion. We had so much fun with all of them. 

Walk with Char and Ty around their little neighborhood

Visiting Jimmy at work

Wrestling Tyler

Char and Joey!

The boys

More boys

Charina and Jimmy and Tyler and Joey are doing great. We witnessed Charina dominating her sunbeam class, Jimmy dominating his awesome job, Tyler figuring out potty training and big boy bed, Joey looking simply surprised always, we stuffed our faces, we played hours of Tichu, we thrifted and park-ed and shopped and Texas-ed and Stacey's-ed and Sweet Frog-ed and successfully threw off every single one of the Willis's carefully structured routines! Thank you peeps! 

We woke up early the day of our departure because Billy wanted to check out some of the Dallas sights on our way out. So, we went and saw a longhorn cattle run frozen in time, situated pleasantly in the most unparklike park Dallas had to offer. 

haha we laughed our heads off at this thing. Whose idea was this? It's in the middle of a perfectly huge city and not a soul even acknowledges it. 

I wish you could see the full glory of these bronze statues and how delightfully random they are. I wish we had accidentally stumbled on it, but the fact that we actually sought them out ended up being funnier since they are totally not a cool thing for anyone else in Dallas. 

So of course, we wanted to see more! Billy studied  a water feature of horses running through water in one of his classes cus it's like a famous water feature, but it was so absolutely tucked away in the middle of a nodescript courtyard of an otherwise very normal office building full of no one but executives and other corporate type that when we told the desk boy we were visiting he clearly thought we were crazy. Not to mention I looked like a homeless person in my road trip garb/hair. 

Anyway, the horses. They were great!

It's cool because the way the water is structured makes it look like they're actually running through water. Get it?

See? Homeless. 

We laughed our heads off. So many funny things about that situation, mostly the fact that those Texans just love their bronze animals in motion. I guess if you've got virtually nothing else in your state, it's something to be proud of. Which, no one is. We were clearly the only people there.

Then onto Carlsbad! Where we were homeless and hung out in McDonald's for a few hours before braving the very harsh New Mexico conditions to do some winter camping. No sarcasm there, it was SO COLD. And strictly ice. Snow fell in ice cubes. Not my favorite. 

We stayed pretty warm all night and woke up to more snow/ice. It was fun camping, even though I was scared we were going to get scalped by Navajos or eaten by wild dingos all night. 

Ah we were so homeless this whole trip! We just lived in that car. 

McDonald's. We planned on going to Carlsbad Caverns the next day, but unfortunately they closed the road to the caves because there had been 20 accidents on it the night before. Yikes! So we were sad that we couldn't go, but at least we got to sit in McDonald's some more with a picture of the caverns haha. 

Then we also tried to go to Roswell to see the Alien Museum, and also they closed that because the weather was bad (or something, I thought Roswell was not so bad.) But we did miss it! Sad! Two of our adventures gone. Alas. Someday we will go back and get them both. 

Then onto Albuquerque to spend New Year's Eve. We had loosely planned on camping in Alb. but it was so cold and we were so tired and dirty and homeless by the time we got there that we got a hotel, which of course is also a huge treat! So we were excited about that. 

Hotel parking lot picture, notable only for the huge pile of tumbleweeds in the background. 

We spent New Year's watching a movie and sleeping. Party right? It was so fun to be with Billy and a hotel was a fun adventure, so we still had a good time saying farewell to 2014. 

And this picture is in honor of Sarahho, with whom I split many a pieces of gum on that 12th stroke of midnight for many new year's of our childhoods. 

Then we got back in the car! Which was a disaster by then, especially since Charina found us a full Christmas tree on the curb of her neighborhood so our trunk was completely full of tree. 

New Year's Day we hung out in Alb. until we could run the Egg Nog Jog! It was SO FUN, definitely made missing the caverns and the aliens all worth it. Billy was the best running buddy and we totally dominated. I wasn't planning on really competitively racing, but I can't help it, especially in a 5k. We did good. And that's 13 states for me now! 

And that's it! Billy drove like a champ, we probably drove like 50 hours. And the Oldsmobile treated us great. What an adventure! Now on to the adventures of the new year, which hopefully include warmer camping trips, more mountainous landscapes and an equal amount of fast food.